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Rethinking Laundry in the 21st Century

By The Editors October 25, 2009 7:00 pmOctober 25, 2009 7:00 pm

Larry MishkarThe air-dry method in Olympia, Wash. To see more reader photographs of clotheslines, go to Green Inc.

On college campuses, in subdivisions, hotels and even prisons, efforts to transform the way Americans do their laundry are steadily building. Save energy, save money: what’s not to like? It turns out that it takes persistence and research.

Should Americans have the right to hang their laundry outdoors, even if many of their neighbors oppose it and community rules ban clotheslines as unsightly threats to property values? Legislators in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have prohibited anti-clothesline rules, and similar action is being considered in several other states. (Catch up with the issue on The Times’s Green Inc.) How do college students do their laundry, without hanging a lot of clothes in the quad? How do hotels get their guests to reuse their towels? And how do prisons balance their sanitation and security needs yet reduce laundry costs?

Giving Up the Dryer

The tumble dryer is the second largest energy-consuming appliance and the leading cause of house fires among appliances. There is no such sense as an Energy Star dryer; these machines are inherently inefficient, using natural gas or electricity to heat air.

Look to Italy and Denmark for guidance.

In Italy, only about three or four percent of households own a dryer. In Denmark, newly constructed student housing included space for indoor drying. In China, the bamboo shaft is still a ubiquitous clothesline. In the United States, approximately 80 percent of households own a dryer. Project Laundry List believes, from anecdotal evidence, that the vast majority of families can see a 10 to 20 percent savings on their electric bill by going cold turkey and setting up a clothesline or drying rack.

While the Department of Energy spokesperson is correct in saying, “Clothes drying, both gas and electric, uses about 3 percent of all [my emphasis] energy used in homes,” this leaves the wrong impression. Laundry dried at a laundromat or down the hall at your multifamily housing complex’s shared unit does not show up at all in this statistic, because it is technically commercial energy consumption, as are the millions of pounds of laundry done at prisons (home to 2 million people), hospitals, restaurants, fish piers, and universities, for example.

While pretty much every household has a refrigerator, millions of households do not have dryers. Looking at the average, instead of the median, household energy consumed by a dryer may leave people with an inadequate impression of how much energy would actually be saved were we to move toward wider adoption of clotheslines.

Speaking of cold, make sure you turn your washing machine and dryer dial to the low temperature setting, as this will also save you a tremendous amount of energy. There is little evidence that washing in warm or hot water (140 degrees) or drying at high heat can kill the viruses and bacteria about which we should be most concerned. There is plenty of evidence that running power plants and mining for natural gas in order to power domestic hot water heaters is causing asthma and climate disruption at the micro and macro level.

The Post-Clothespin Generation

Chelsea Hodge graduated from Pomona College in 2009 as a double major in economics and environmental analysis. She currently works as a research analyst for E Source, an energy efficiency research and advisory firm and lives in Boulder, Colo.

If 95 percent of Italians, some of earth’s most fashion-conscious inhabitants, don’t own a dryer, then why are Americans so adamant about tumble drying their clothes? After contemplating this question while studying abroad in Florence, I decided to begin turning the tides by starting at an obvious place—my college campus.

With a strong majority of college students deeply concerned about climate change and college administrators vying to one-up each others’ greenness, college campuses seem an ideal place to promote line-drying laundry.

Despite this potential, my initial research yielded the finding that only a handful of colleges actively give their students the opportunity to line-dry their clothes. Unable to find much information about these initiatives, I set about designing a program for my alma mater — Pomona College — from the ground up. An online survey of 20 percent of the student body revealed that students have a strong preference for drying their clothes in a private, secure space.

And a survey of the campus revealed that Pomona, with its suburban location and highly manicured campus, would not be a good match for ground level outdoor clotheslines, despite our sunny Southern California location.

After considering everything from out-the-window clothesline pulleys, to rooftop lines, to installing racks in residence hall bathrooms and hallways, I decided on two approaches. The first was the installation of one or more compact drying racks in all residence hall laundry rooms that had space for them, for a total of 420 feet installed. The second was the launch of a racks-for-loan program in which students could check out a compact, foldable drying rack for a semester from the Sustainability Integration Office to use in their room. The checkout program began with 25 racks and was so successful that another 40 were purchased the following year.

Despite the fact that line-drying laundry is widespread in much of the developed world, including Europe and Australia, it is no longer a part of mainstream American culture, thanks, perhaps, to our increasingly affluent, urbanized and over-scheduled populace.

My hope is that drying racks and laundry lines on college campuses will give students who never held a clothespin growing up the chance to try out and ultimately embrace the simple act of hanging out their clothes. Though the drying racks at Pomona are unlikely to significantly reduce the college’s greenhouse gas emissions, the behavior learned, spread over a lifetime and among friends and family, can definitely have an impact.

Hotel Room Psychology

During your last hotel stay, you probably encountered an in-room card asking you to reuse your towels. Although wordings vary, such cards always urge this action to preserve the environment. What the cards never say is that the majority of guests do reuse their towels at least once when requested. My research team suspected that this omission was costing the hotels — and the environment — plenty.

The psychological key to getting hotel guests to reuse towels.

To test our suspicion, we conspired with the management of an upscale hotel to place one of four cards in its guestrooms. Three cards employed some version of the typical environmental appeal. A fourth card added (true) information that the majority of guests do reuse their towels when asked.

The outcome? Compared with the first three messages, the final message increased towel reuse by 34 percent. How easily we can be influenced to act by honest information about how those around us are acting.

Adding Moisture to the Air

Last year my Environmental Science 110 classmates and I created the 350.org Underwear Project on Allegheny College’s campus. This project highlighted the contribution of machine-drying clothes to atmospheric carbon dioxide and illustrated an alternative: line-drying our laundry (underwear). We tapped into 350.org, an international movement to lower atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million from about 385 parts per million.

It is often pointed out that my generation did not grow up with clotheslines. But a strength of our generation is that if a group makes something available to us, shows us how easy it is and emphasizes its utility, we will take to it. If someone came to a college and installed a hang-dry system, educated the campus on the simplicity of it and emphasized its benefits — less of an energy cost to us, a healthier atmosphere, a political action affecting the global community — we would adopt the cause as our own.

This does not mean people have to see laundry lines. The interior of dorms are a great place to install laundry lines, rather than leaving them out in our temperate northern climate. Indoor air is notoriously dry during the winter due to the use of furnaces. However line-drying clothes would help add moisture to the air and therefore reduce the spread of seasonal flu germs which thrive in warm, dry air. The ceilings of laundry rooms are under-utilized and would lend themselves to such an endeavor.

Of course, such a hang-dry system would have to exist alongside a regular dryer system at first because of space limitations that will need to be worked out (capacity) and students’ current habits. If everyone dried their spare sheets, towels, washcloths, socks and other items that might not be needed the next day and reduced their dryer use to once every week or two weeks it would be a giant step in the right direction.

Even Prisons Can Save on Dryers

One American institution that uses a huge amount of energy — and a lot of it in laundry costs — is the prison system. Obviously the first priorities in a prison are security, safety and sanitation. Energy efficiency takes a back seat. Clotheslines are obviously not an option in prisons for security concerns: officials fear prisoners might try to commit suicide or attack other prisoners, or use the line to escape.

So what about the option of changing from hot water to cold water? That would save a huge amount of money. Not all ozone systems are clinically validated to kill bacteria and viral strands — always a concern in such a close environment — but with clinical disinfection this technology changes the cold vs. hot water issue.

A properly manufactured and supported ozone laundry system can reduce total water by as much as 30 percent, save 80 percent on hot water usage and reduce drying times as high as 20 percent. How does it work?

With the most efficient systems, ozone is directly injected in to the base of the wash wheel. Once injected, the ozone serves as a disinfectant and a catalyst for wash chemicals. The ozone relaxes fibers and reduces surface tension. This allows the mechanical action of the washer and the chemistry to be more efficient, which is the primary reason for the decrease in water usage. Because ozone relaxes the fabrics, moisture retention is improved during the extract step of the wash cycle. The less moisture in the laundry allows for significant reduction in dry time.

In state prisons in Missouri, the Aquawing ozone laundry system is being used to save $1.2 million a year as well as millions of gallons of water each year. Based on results independently reported by Corrections Forum magazine, the return on this investment is less than 14 months. While environmental concerns are not at the top of state officials’ lists when it comes to prisons, reducing costs is a huge priority.

A Mobile Home Park’s Hesitance

Jill Saylor is a full-time cook in Canton, Ohio, and a part-time student at Kent State University.

My mobile home park was leery about using clotheslines because I think they thought that the tenants would hang them from trees and in between trailers and that it would look trashy. It’s not the nicest mobile home park, so I’m not sure what they were worried about.

But we pushed and petitioned for the umbrella kind that could be taken down and put away at night. They wouldn’t be in the front yard, and you can hang your underwear on the inside of the line and hide them behind your shirts and pants on the outside rows.

I phoned and phoned the home office of the park until I finally reached the owner and he allowed the use of them, after I mentioned the letter in the mail that they just raised our lot rent $10.

It was bittersweet though because the weather had turned cold and rainy by then. I posted signs at the mail boxes to share the good news, and they were taken down, but then put back up two days later. I continue to dry my clothes on the line inside and haven’t used my dryer in months now. My electric bill is so much lower, and I’m making an impact on the planet as well.

I grew up with our mom hanging our clothes out to dry. We hated that she hung our underwear up to where the neighbor kids (who we played with all our childhood lives) could see them. But other than that, it never occurred to us that it was odd to hang laundry outside.

Ode to a Clothesline

Constance Casey, a former New York City Parks Department gardener, writes regularly on natural history and gardening for Slate. Her blog is The Observant Gardener.

There is more to using a clothesline than righteously defying community authorities or saving money. The process of pinning the clothes on the line has unexpected pleasures. The first revelation is that when you’re hanging clothes, you can’t help looking up. The red and white striped shirt against the blue sky becomes as significant as William Carlos Williams’ white chickens and red wheelbarrow on which so much depends.

Like arranging flowers, hanging clothes on a line can be a form of art.

Choosing to pin a pale peach T-shirt next to a bright blue bathrobe feels like the decision-making that goes into putting flowers in a vase. (The bathrobe sash, by the way, stretched and clipped, dried flat, un-scrunched, for the first time since it came from the store.) Especially on a hot, breezy day, this is an even more ephemeral art form than arranging flowers. Neighbors have commented that the display is a reminder of the past, and the opposite of unsightly (To add to the mood of yesteryear, I hold a couple of clothespins in my mouth.)

Having a clothesline makes you acutely sensitive to the weather — scattered showers or windy and bright. This is yet another of those cases, increasing as we try to figure out how to fit in to the natural world without wrecking it, in which we’re called upon to be more observant, patient and flexible.

Not long ago, tens of thousands of people in Ontario took up the Toronto power company’s offer of free clotheslines. Darn, maybe the Canadians really are more attuned to nature than we are. They probably trudge through hip-deep snow to hang their flannel shirts and nightgowns. Let’s think flexible: On bright days, enjoy the sky; When it’s raining, use the drier.